I think I may have opened Pandora’s Box, with one class at least.
There’s a section in there textbook (Let’s Go II) in which the content suddenly takes a huge leap forward without actually introducing useful vocabulary first at all. More than that, certain concepts (like that of an address based on a street name and a linear ordering of house numbers) are entirely foreign to Japanese kids, because things just don’t work that way here.
I took it as a challenge, and got the kids through the lesson mainly by almost entirely abandoning the lesson plans in the book and taking them through a crash course of addressing conventions the US way. I’m pretty sure they actually got it, by the end. However, I could only do this by spending some time with a dictionary beforehand and making certain classroom aids (“東” -> East; “小学校” -> Elementary School, and so forth).
They got the lesson, but they got another impression even more forcefully: “この外人は日本語が分かります。” (This foreigner understands Japanese.) I think that the fact that on the whiteboard, I write better kanji than they do has something to do with it.
There is a simple reason this is unfortunate: I don’t think I have nearly the grasp of the language they suspect me of. Copying kanji from a dictionary (and only then because the dictionary was intended for Japanese people and doesn’t include furigana) does not mean that I could reproduce the same kanji an hour later, but they absolutely refused to believe me when I told them that I’m bad at kanji, citing the counterexamples sitting on the board in front of them. Furthermore, my working vocabulary in Japanese is at least as limited as theirs is in English, if not more so; I don’t want to set a precedent of understanding Japanese that I’ll inevitably break later (whether or not they believe my incomprehension).
With a bit of luck, this will all work out fine without much extra effort on my part. Still, it has the potential to go strangely horrible.
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